word-books for Handel's performances of Samson, The

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Burrows, Donald

13. Hans Dieter Clausen has suggested that Handel may have revised the score in two stages, incorporating Mrs Cibber first, and then making provision for Edwards, Avolio and Lowe; I thank Dr Clausen for sharing with me the initial results of his own study of the Samson sources.

14. See the letter of 11 October 1743 from John Christopher Smith senior to James Harris, in Donald Burrows & Rosemary Dunhill: Music and theatre in Handel's world: the family papers of James Harris 1732-80 (Oxford, 2002), p. 171; the implications of this letter will be considered further in a forthcoming article, 'Mr Harris's score', by the present author.

15. Letter, Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 24 Feb 1743; Otto Erich Deutsch: Handel: a documentary biography (London, 1955), p.560.

16.1 thank Graydon Beeks for first alerting me to this matter, when he checked the two copies of the first edition at the Huntington Library at my request. I am now examining all known copies of the edition, and at present it seems that the two versions are represented in approximately equal numbers. There is also the possibility of a third variant, differing only in one minor detail of punctuation.

17. A possible explanation for the situation could be that for some reason more pages for the second half of the book had initially been printed than for the first half, but other evidence suggests otherwise: the pages of the first version have a watermark reading 'Stamp Office', and this is not found in the relevant pages of the second version.

18. For the variants, see the table in Dean: Handel's dramatic oratorios and masques. Appendix H.

19. No copies of word-books dated 1745 are known for the works that Handel revived in that year (as distinct from new productions). It is possible that surplus stocks from previous years were sold in 1745, without revision; the title-pages of the '1743' word-books for Samson however refer specifically to Covent Garden theatre and Handel gave his 1745 performances at the King's Theatre.

20. This may explain the presence of the identical wood-cut decoration on pp. 15 and 24, which should have been impossible if the wordbook had been set up as one integral project. The single surviving exemplar of the third edition has brackets written round some sections of text on pp. 18-32; these may be markings for cuts relating to the preparation of a subsequent edition, but there could be other explanations, including the possibility that the brackets were added by Victor Schoelcher in the 19th century in the course of collating the text with another word-book.

21. Another area of uncertainty concerns Samson's air 'My strength is from the living God' and the preceding recitative, which an early manuscript copy describes as Omitted in performance', the text for which is bracketed in the copy of the third issue of the word-book, and omitted in the fourth: the music concerned was presumably included in the initial performances of Handel's 1743 run.

22. Dalila's four lines of recitative beginning 'Alas! Th'event was worse than I foresaw', which preceded 'With plaintive notes' in Handel's original draft score, were moved to follow the air when the latter was reallocated to a second soprano singer. In the third edition of the word-book the recitative lines were cut, but in the fourth edition they were restored to their original position, which makes sense when the air is sung by Dalila. The lines did not appear in subsequent wordbooks. The air was probably to be sung by Dalila in the versions represented by both the third and fourth editions, but the re-arrangement of the text resulted in the omission of a character-name in the third edition and the erroneous attribution to Samson in the fourth edition; the air is designated for Dalila in the editions from 1749 onwards.